The third espisode of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse airs tonight on Fox at 10:00. 

The numbers for the second episode continue a downward trend, and this is very worrying.

I think it's clear by this time that Whedon is not going back to Buffy.  Of course, we would like him to.  But it's just time to move on.  He has.  We must.  As media consumers, we are that most contrary of creature: we want Whedon to do something completely fresh and completely familiar.  What is wrong with us?

In a post-Buffy spirit, then, here are a couple of things I like about Dollhouse.

1. Dollhouse is a great metaphor for Hollywood.  This industry assigns identities for brief durations, wipes them clean, and insist that the actor start again.  Very Dollhouse.  So we may amuse ourselves this evening by watching for parallels and Whedonesque commentary.  (The story within the story: Whedon is a third generation TV writer, so he knows a thing or two about the industry.  Furthermore, he's had a rocky relationship with this industry.  So he might have a thing or two to say.)  I leave it to you to map out who in Dollhouse is what in Hollywood.

2. Dollhouse is a great metaphor for the actor.  In Friday's episode, Echo (Eliza Dushku) is showing distressing signs of independence.  The crucial moment, when she refuses the secret code word that is supposed to reassure her.  Hollywood actors must often feel like their autonomy is in peril.  They have so many masters: studios, agents, producers, directors, writers, and fans that the temptation to embrace independence must be very strong.  (The alternative might be outbursts of the kind delivered recently by Christian Bale.  There must come a moment when you' ve just had enough of being obliged to deliver note-perfect emotions on command…and while someone moves a light stand behind you.)  

3.  Dollhouse is a great metaphor for the contemporary individual.  In episode 2, Echo is picking up stray signals ("shoulder to the wheel!") and now that many of us live an "expansionary individualism," now that many of us act as "complex adaptive systems," so perhaps do the rest of us.  Indeed, this must be how trends get started.  The early adopters can "just hear something" in the wind.  They adopt it and if others follow suit, Gladwell's tipping point is not far off.  Cultural change almost always starts as stray signals and Echo is perhaps a chance to contemplate how stray signals start. 

post script: Zsa Zsa and Vivian join the McCracken Decesare household this evening. They are Siamese kittens, sisters, 14 weeks old, and by all accounts complete chatter boxes. Molly, as some of you know, is the cat incumbent.  She is 4 years old and it remains to be seen how she will regard the newcomers.

References

For more on expansionary individualism, see my Transformations: identity construction in a contemporary culture.  For more on "complex adaptive systems," see my Flock and Flow.  Forgive the self citing.  It saves time.

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Identity-Construction-Contemporary-Culture/dp/0253219574/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235747952&sr=1-1

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Indiana University Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Flock-Flow-Predicting-Managing-Marketplace/dp/0253347599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235747871&sr=8-1

I recommend having a look at The Black List, Volume 2, tonight at 8:00 on HBO. 

I saw Volume 1 a couple of months ago and I was stunned by how good it was. 

Bill T. Jones (pictured here in a photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders) was especially good. 

Here's what I heard Jones saying.  (This is a delicate point and it is entirely possible I've got it wrong.  I apologize to Mr. Jones if this is the case.  Jones doesn't need anyone to speak for him, and if there were a YouTube clip of this Black List moment, I wouldn't try.) 

Jones appears to be saying there is a racism after racism.  After some of barriers of the first racism have been clearer away, an African American discovers that there is still a group of people who are prepared to tell him who he is and how he must act,  to say "we know who you are" and insist "you must be that person," in other words, to assign and police his identity.

This second racism may come from liberal motives.  It may come from otherwise liberal people.  But it is still (usually but not only) a white person presuming to define, constrain, police and punish a black person.  And I think that makes it racism.  Right?  Surely.  Unless someone has the liberty to take up the full "sovereignity of the individual" as Lamont calls it, until they are free to invent themselves for any and all purposes, they are not entirely free.  (The argument in short form: If there are some people who enjoy self-defining freedom more than other people, then they are privileged and the second group disadvantaged.  And if this right and refusal is distributed by race, then both the right and the refusal are racism.) 

In his segment on The Black List, Volume 1, Chris Rock gives us a glimpse of a variation on the theme.  He notes that African Americans who took up positions previously forbidden them by racism were obliged to be larger than life, heroic, exemplary.  This is a double standard too.  An African American can't be merely as good as white player.  He has to be much better.  In the case of baseball, he can't be a 'pretty good utility infielder,' he has to be Jackie Robinson.  As Rock puts it,

Baseball isn't equal till the 1970s, because that's when you start to see bad Black baseball players.  The true equality is the equality to suck like the white man.  That's Martin Luther's dream coming true. (2:50-3:14)

Being bad is a freedom too.  I think I am right in saying that Thelma Golden, the museum curator, also touches on the theme in question here.

Anyhow, I urge you to watch The Black List tonight on HBO.  I do hope HBO will rerun Volume 1 soon. 

References

For more on The Black List and Volume 1
http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/theblacklist/

For a clip, but not the clip, of Bill T. Jones on The Black List, go here.

For a clip of Chris Rock on the theme discussed here, go here.

Lamont, Michele. 1992. Money, Morals and Manners: the culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for the opportunity to use the image of Bill T. Jones.  With Elvis Mitchell, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is the creator and producer of The Black List. 

Tesco's Fresh and Easy grocery stores have been in the US for about 15 months.  They are not performing as expected, and the finger pointing has started.

One object of suspicion is the early research.  Originally, this work was thought exemplary because it was ethnographic.  Tesco Marketing director Simon Unwins recalls,

We went into people’s houses, talked to them about food and food shopping. We went into their kitchens and poked round pantries.

And indeed Tesco invested more than the usual time and money.

The company has spent years gathering detailed information on every aspect of American life. Most retailers would think they had done their homework after the usual focus groups and surveys, but Tesco went much further. Researchers, including a small cohort of top executives, spent two weeks living with 60 American families. They poked around in their kitchen cupboards, watched them cook and followed them as they shopped.  (The Economist)

But did Tesco grasp the method they were using?  There is a distressing habit these days to think the ethnographic due diligence has been satisfied if interview are done in-home and in-store.  In point of fact, an interview not in-home is not ethnographic.  Unless certain methodological conditions are satisfied, it is merely an interview done in-home.

Ethnography is good at the following things. 

1.  it is good at picking up the telling detail.  And yes, you want to be in someone's home to do this.  Or at point of purchase.  Or where the product gets consumed.  IDEO is good at this sort of thing.   

2.  it is good an embracing point of view, so that we see all the details at once.  This is the "holistic" approach for which anthropological is in the social sciences famous.  As we shall, see it looks at if Tesco failed on this point

3.  it is good at seeing the topic from several (and collective) points of view, the client's, the consumer's, the various members of the household, family, neighborhood, city, etc.  This is the cultural point of view.  And it looks as if Tesco entirely missed this entirely.

4.  it is good at dollying back from fine details to an ever larger picture so that we see the product, or innovation, or opportunity in successively broaders contexts.  This is the strength of the big management consulting houses like McKinsey.  What they lack in ethnographic nuance and cultural understanding, they make up in the construction of a powerful strategic picture.

The irony: when we define ethnography as interviews done in-home, almost all of this potential value is lost.

Back to Tesco.  It looks as if Tesco may have satisfied the Condition 1.  But it looks now that even by a literal understanding of ethnography, it was too narrow.  As the Sunday Times puts it,

Mason now admits, they did not poke around their garages, where they would have found huge freezer chests bulging with stockpiled meat bought on special offer.

Conditions 2 and 3 were failed as well, apparently.  The anonymous observer on the blog Fresh and Easy Buzz suggests that with noses pressed up against the kitchen window, Tesco researchers missed:

basic aspects and practices of how food and grocery retailing in America works.

These research failures include such simple basics as how Americans prefer fresh, bulk produce over pre-packaged, to …  the regional, sub-regional, sub-sub regional and local nature of grocery retailing in the U.S. — that there are regional markets like the Western U.S., then sub-regional markets within those which have extensive differences, like California, Nevada and Arizona, then additional sub-sub regional markets within those, such as Southern, Central and Northern California, and then even local markets within those sub-sub regional ones, right on down to the neighborhood level. There are niches within the niches.

In a more perfect world, ethnography moves from the small detail to an embracing view.  Here's how Lafley and Charan put it in The Game-Changer. 

P&G needed to look at consumer more broadly.  It tended to narrow in on only one aspect of the consumer–for example, their mouth for oral-care products, their hair for shampoo, their loads of dirty clothes and their washing machines for laundry detergents. 

P&G had essentially extracted the consumer out of her own life (and, at times, a particular body part as well!) and myopically focused on what was most important to the company–the product or the technology.  P&G has since learned to understand and appreciate her and her life–how busy she is; her job responsibilities; the role she plays for her children, husband, and other family members; and her personal and family aspirations and dreams. 

This broader view promised an advantage.

[It] has enabled the identifications of innovation opportunity that truly provide meaningful solutions to her household and personal-care needs and wants that otherwise wouldn't have been discovered through more-traditional, more-narrow, and often more-superficial methods.  (p. 36)

In an entirely perfect world, the ethnographer understands the consumer with Lafley-esque nuance.  He or she gets the cultural context, the life context, the aspirational context down to the ground.  But the ethnographer also gets what we might call the McKinsey-esgue context, the one that comes from a deep mastery of the structure of the market, the industry, the competitors, and the competitive state of play right up to the heavens. 

At it's best, ethnography supplies the biggest picture.  The trick is how to do those interviews in home but still generalize to the larger cutural, competitive and strategic factors that make it make sense.  From a parochial point of view, I like to think of this as putting the anthropology back in the ethnography.  But if I too am obliged to take the larger view, it's also a matter of putting the IDEO, the Lafley, and the McKinsey back in ethnography. 

The risks are fantastically high.  As the Tesco CEO put it two years ago:

“Clearly it’s high risk,” agrees Sir Terry. “But we’ve carefully balanced the risk. If it fails it’s embarrassing. It might show up in my career [and] it’ll cost an amount of money that’s easily affordable by Tesco—call it £1 billion if you like. If it succeeds then it’s transformational.”  (The Economist)

But it is not just careers that hang in the balance.  If we continue to diminish what  ethnography is, the very method is in peril. 

References

Anonymous.  2009.  Fresh & Easy Buzz: A Healthy 'Mea Culpa': Tesco Fresh & Easy CEO Tim Mason Says 'We Got it Wrong;' Comments Tend to Agree With Fresh & Easy Buzz Analysis and Arguments.  Fresh and Easy Buzz http://freshneasybuzz.blogspot.com/2009/02/healthy-mea-culpa-tesco-fresh-easy.html

Anonymous.  2007.  Fresh, far from easy.  The Economist.  June 21, 2007.

Kay, William.  2009.  Tesco admits: We got it wrong in US.  The Sunday Times. 
February 22, 2009.

Lafley, A.G. and Ram Charan. 2008.  The Game-changer.  New York: Crown.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Paul Snyderman for pointing me in the right direction. 

The useful anthropology of contemporary culture is a distressingly small library.  (I have listed some titles below.  This is not an exhaustive list, but neither is it a very partial subset of the complete universe.)

So it's a joy to welcome a new book by Kate Fox called Watching the English. 

In the opening moments of this book, we find Fox summoning courage enough to continue her work.  She is breaking the cue rule in an English public space, the better to see, exactly, what the cue rule is and how it works.  (Roughly, the cue rule is, of course, "stand in line, wait your turn."  But of course with all social rules there is lots more to it than that.  More below.)  Oh, perfect.  You want quiet fury, try breaking the cue rule in an English public space.  Thus does the anthropologist sacrifice her happiness on our behalf. 

A book like this wants to honor its academic origins and objectives without failing to make itself agreeable, and I think Fox hits an almost perfect compromise.  Watching is formal without being too writerly, and amusing without being too readerly. 

But the real test is the simple one.  Does the book illuminate things you did not see, does it reframe things you thought you knew, does it make the world more legible?  Yes, on all counts.  This is a book Anthropologists can admire and non-anthropologists can read. 

There were a couple of quibbles for this reader.  The older I get the more I think the secret key to English life might be Castiglione's The Book Called the Courtier.  And there is no mention of it here. 

Watching the English has the advantage of an intelligent choice.  In the place of long and windy treatments of the meanings at large in English culture, Fox examines the rules at play in any given social situation.  This has advantage of relieving Fox of postmodernist self absorbtion…and we actually learn something. 

All social life is rule-bound, of course, but the English, living in the close quarters of a small island are positively Japanese in the codification of public life, and then in their secret, anarchic way, entirely Italian in their willingness to rework these rules in real time and on the spot.  (Hence Fox's need to break the cue rule.)

The challenge of focusing on rules (and I haven't finished Watching so I can't say whether this is acknowledged by Fox or not), is that the English have historically had a habit of marking people of high standing by releasing them from the rules.  (One of the privileges of being a Cambridge don is that the college "stay off the grass" rule does not apply to you.)  This is precisely the logic of the sumptuary legislation of the medieval and early modern period.  People of very high standing have access to everything, and this permission is gradually taking away as we work our way down the hierarchy. 

And this brings us back to Castiglione.  His idea that the courtier should conceal art with art is, perhaps, another way of saying not just that effort should not show, but that rules not apply.  Certainly they should not ever be seen to apply.  The courtier's grace is not rule-bound but intuitive, instinctive and therefore not very rule-ish at all. 

But I digress.  This is a wonderful book.  It manages to do in a few hundred pages more than American anthropology has done in the last ten years.  It shows how a Western, first world, culture works as a culture. 

References

Arensberg, Conrad. 1955. American Communities. American Anthropologist 57: 1143-62.

Brand, Steward. 1988. Indians and the Counterculture, 1960s-1970s.  History of Indian-White Relations: Handbook of North American Indians. editor Wilcomb E. Washburn, 570-572. Vol. 4. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Caplow, Theodore. 1984. Rule enforcement without visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown. American Journal of Sociology 89: 1306-23.

Carrier, James G. 1990. Gifts in a world of commodities: The ideology of the perfect gift in American society. Social Analysis 29: 19-37.

Carrier, James G. 1997. Meanings of the market: the free market in western culture. Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford. New York: Berg.

Carrier, James G. 1992. Occidentalism: The world turned upside-down. American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 May: 195-212.

Castiglione, Baldassarre. 1967. The book of the courtier from the Italian, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, anno 1561, with an introduction by Walter Raleigh. Tudor Translations, 23. New York: AMS Press.

Caughey, John L. 1984. Imaginary social worlds: a cultural approach. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at home: anthropologies, others, American modernity. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Drummond, Lee. 1996. American dreamtime: a cultural analysis of popular movies, and their implications for a science of humanity. Lanham, Md: Littlefield Adams Books.

Fox, Kate. 2008. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fox, Richard Wightman. 1983. Epitaph for Middletown: Robert S. Lynd and the Analysis of Consumer Culture. in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980. eds Richard Wightman Fox, and Jackson T. J. Lears, 103-41. New York: Pantheon.

Hsu, Francis L. K. 1963. Clan, Caste, and Club. New York: Van Nostrand.

Huber, Richard M. 1987. The American Idea of Success. New York: Pushcart Press. 

Katz, Donald R. 1992. Home fires: An intimate portrait of one middle-class family in postwar America. New York: Aaron Asher Books.

Klein, Richard. 1993. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Kluckhohn, Clyde and Florence R. Kluckhohn. 1946-1964. American Culture: Generalized orientations and class patterns. in Conflicts of Power in Modern Culture. editors Lyman Louis Finkelstein Bryson, and R.M.Maciver, 106-28. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc.

Kugelmass, Jack. 1988. Between two worlds: ethnographic essays on American Jewry. Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. 

Merelman, Richard M. 1984. Making Something of Ourselves: On Culture and Politics in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Miner, Horace. 1956. Body Ritual among the Nacirema. The American Anthropologist 58: 503-7.

Schneider, David. 1968. American kinship: a cultural account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spradley, James P. 1970. You owe yourself a drunk: an ethnography of urban nomads. The Little, Brown Series in Anthropology. Boston: Little, Brown.

Traube, Elizabeth G. 1996. "The Popular" in American Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 127-51.

Varenne, Herve. 1977. Americans Together: structured diversity in a midwestern town. New York: Teachers College Press .

Varenne, Hervé. 1986. Symbolizing America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Vogt, Evon Zartman. 1955. Modern homesteaders: the life of a twentieth century frontier community. –. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Warner, W. Lloyd. 1953. American life: dream and reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilk, Richard. 1999. Consuming America. Anthropology Newsletter 40, no. 2: 1, 4-5.

Wolf, Eric R. 1969. American Anthropologists and American Society. in Reinventing Anthropology. editor Dell Hymes, 251-63. New York: Pantheon Books.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1993. The Fine Line. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press

.

Some ads live, some ads die. 

Some ads get more interesting in rotation.  Other ads wither, and before long they're an agony.  Without the blessing of TIVO, we're obliged to watch them like someone out of Clockwork Orange.

Take the case of "What if delivery people run the world."  This is an ad for the Blackberry Curve 8350i with Sprint Nextconnect.  (See the ad on YouTube here.)

There is nothing egregiously wrong with this ad, but once we've seen it twice it becomes 30 seconds of tedium.  The only thing that lives is the kid stuck in the locker.

Now consider the case of "Yard Sale," the AT&T FamilyTalk Rollover Minutes.  (See the ad on YouTube here.)  This ad is a joy.  We have seen this campaign a lot in the last few months.  So the pretext, the son who wants to jetison roll over minutes and the mother who wants to keep them, is familiar.

There is lots to love here.  The son's reference to the AT&T minutes he's trying to give away as "antiques."  The neighborhood women who looks on in astonishment as the argument between mother and son rages.  The neighborhood kid told to "beat it, kid." 

And the best moment, is the look the neighborhood women gives the neighborhood kid, as if to say, "these people are cracked."

The neighborhood lady does a little eyebrow flash that sums up her attitude, as if to say "this situation is completely unfair, what are you going to do." (I can't capture it with Snagit.  Above, to the right, is the look of solidarity between the Lady and the Kid.)

Good idea, good execution, good acting in the first case, great acting in the second.  But it's hard to say why one ad should reward reviewing and the other should feel like a punishment. 

I think it comes down to very tiny details that we don't see at first.  That eyebrow flash is minute but I have grown to love it.  The trouble with the Blackberry/Sprint ad is that the moment you get the theme, the ad reveals itself too fully.  It's old before it's over.  The good thing about the AT&T is that it doesn't play to form.

But I don't doubt that we could do a better job than this figuring out why some ads live and others die.  See Alan's brilliant comment below illuminating why this ad works so well.

In a TIVO era, with the very business model of the advertising agency now in jeopardy, this feels like a compelling opportunity for urgent anthropology, or, as I was typoed it in a grant application, argent anthropology.  Email me, if you are interested in pursuing this theme. 

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Roy Elvove, Director, Corporate Communications, BBDO North America and Worldwide.  Here are the details on the creative team at BBDO.

Agency: BBDO New York and BBDO Atlanta

Chief Creative Officers: David Lubars and Bill Bruce

Exec Creative Director: Susan Credle

Creative Directors: David Skinner and Darren Wright

Copywriter: Peter Alsante

Producer: Julie Andariese

Production Co: Smuggler

Director: Chris Smith

Editorial Company: Beast (New York)

Editor: Jim Ulbrich

Visual Effects: Spontaneous (New York)

References

Fox, Jason.  2009.  Who Does AT&T think they are?  Holiday Inn.  The Adhole, February 23, 2009. here.  [By an astounding coincidence, Jason and I both wrote about the AT&T campaign yesterday.  His focus was the "Milky minutes."]

The second episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse runs tonight on Fox at 10:00. 

The numbers for the premier episode were worryingly low.  James Hibberd at Hollywood Reporter calls it

the lowest-rated scripted series premiere on a major broadcast network this season aside from NBC’s now-defunct “Crusoe.”

Last Friday night was a bad time to launch a TV show.  It was the beginning of a long weekend.  It was Valentine’s day.  The movie theater was beckoning. 

Still, Dollhouse didn’t have formidable competition on the dial.  It was up against reality TV and a news program.  Plus, there’s almost no one under the age of 35 who doesn’t love Whedon’s last big success, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

And that may be the real problem, not that it was Friday night, but that it was TV.  Perhaps Whedon should have launched on Hulu.

I am a grateful Buffy fan, but I was put off by the marketing.  The Dollhouse ads  didn’t show any evidence of what I took to be defining features of Buffy: humor and word play.  No, the ads seemed earnest, too dramatic.  Where, I wondered, was Whedon’s lightness of touch?

Plus, from an anthropological point of view, the theme of Dollhouse feels a little done.  The show turns around a women who is constantly having a new self installed and the old one wiped clean.  In a transformational culture like ours, this is interested.  We can relate.  Plus, this is a fantastic vehicle for any filmmaker, a single device that allows from a plenitude of expressive possibilities.  (It is also of course an actresses’ dream, a chance to show depth and range.)  But we have seen this theme done and done, and unless Dollhouse means to bring something new to the table…

I watched last Friday.  It was a struggle to engage.  I watched.  I didn’t care, I didn’t care, and then I did.  Something clicked.  Suddenly, I wanted to know what was going to happen next. 

This is the magical moment of engagement, the moment we go from being a looky loo in TV land to a fan.  How much do we know about this precise moment?  If we haven’t studied it, why haven’t we studied it?  Another job for the Henry Jenkins’ Culture Convergence Consortium at MIT?

Have a look tonight and please tell me what you think.

References

Hibbert, James.  2009.  ‘Dollhouse’ premieres soft; ‘Terminator’ dives.  The Hollywood Reporter.  http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/02/dollhouse-terminator-premiere-ratings.html

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: identity construction in contemporary culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

When Schoenbaum considered 400 years of scholarship on Shakespeare, he couldn’t help notice that the authors of this scholarship had posted portraits of themselves.

It was as natural for Samuel Butler and Oscar Wilde to depict [Shakespeare] as a homosexual as for Frank Harris to depict him as an unabashed sensualist.  It is natural for Catholics to seize on the phrase “he died a papist”; for Bernard Shaw to confess that Shakespeare was like himself and for Malone to suppose that Shakespeare had been a lawyer’s clerk.  [Muir, ref. below]

And this is something we are inclined recognize as entirely human.  Everyone sees the world through their own lens.  We understand the other as we understand ourselves.

Right?  Wrong.  Thirty years downstream the thing that Schoenbaum and Muir thought “natural” seems to us a little tedious, clannish, and unsophisticated.  These days I think, we are more interested in the Shakespeare who isn’t like us than turning him into someone who is like us. 

There is an epistemological problem here.  If we have no categories with which to understand the other, well, we are inclined to assimilate that other to the categories we do have.  But this caveat aside, it seems to be we are less likely to be that figure from the old joke: the man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. 

Something has changed.  We are a little bored with making the world into an image of ourselves.  We are no longer this provincial.  We are no longer this hostile to difference.  We are much more actively curious about how someone can depart from our expectations and ourselves. 

Think of it this way.  In the old model, we wanted to use a conversation as an opportunity to talk about ourselves.  But these days I have seen conversations grind to a halt because both parties are more interested in listening than talking.  When you ask why, they will tell you something like, “well, I already know what I am going to say, so I’d rather listen.”

I don’t know that we are any more selfless.  It’s just that our curious demands a richer diet than anything we have access to when we make scholarship and conversation a self portrait. 

References

Muir, Kenneth.  1971/2008.  Review of Shakepeare’s Lives.  Times Literary Supplement.  Originally published January 22, 1971.  Republished August 15, 2008.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1970. Shakespeare’s Lives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Breakfast is a fundament of American cuisine and American culture.  A change here marks a change in other things. 

Consider these early warning signals from today’s New York Times.

Mark Bittman confesses,

[A] year or two ago, I started eating things at breakfast that you would more likely associate with dinner: black olives, quinoa, miso, dried tomatoes, sesame oil, bok choy, wheat berries, roasted carrots.

Mark says he eats these as left overs.  There is something odd about this.  Breakfast is for breaking the fast, not for renewing the meal after a longish pause. 

When Thomas Keller was creating French Laundry, his Napa Valley restaurant, he decided to raid breakfast for other meals.  He made doughnuts and coffee a dessert.  Julia Moskin explains,

Other top kitchens followed suit, starting with doughnuts and then strip-mining the entire breakfast menu, transforming greasy-spoon staples into minutely detailed desserts. Now, the familiar flavors of granola, scones, bacon, waffles, pancakes and even soggy cornflakes have become materials for the artists at the very top of the inventive and competitive pastry world.

Maybe it’s me, but “breakfast” and “minutely detailed” don’t look right in the same sentence.  Breakfast, as I understand it, is supposed to be rich, reckless, and in its very humble way sumptuous.  It’s supposed to be a reminder of the paradise lost that was sleep.  It’s supposed to be an apology for our rude awakening and to supply a culinary platform from which to survey the coming wonders, curiosities and challenges of the day.  If it’s “minutely detailed,” I think most of this is lost.  Lost on me, in any case.

Should breakfast be subject to these cultural transplantations?  Should it have to suffer the indignity of higher cuisines now prepared to slum their way into breakfast time?  As Russell Davies demonstrates in his superbly interesting study of the English case in point, breakfast has earned the right to traditional treatment.

And I don’t think elevation to fancy restaurants, the last meal of the day and the last plate of the meal is any real compensation.  Breakfast has no aspirations to upward mobility.  It knows who it is and where it belongs.  It shuns exposure to the vagaries of fashion, because in our culture it is one of the places to which people retreat when in retreat from fashion. 

If we are on the verge of a great restoration of traditional values, the better to batten down the hatches, as we ride out our latest perfect storm, I think breakfast may look forward to a restoration of its own.  Let us drive out the pretenders.  Let us repudiate the culinary experiments.  Make that two eggs over easy.  Black coffee.  Oh, and a large orange juice, please. 

References

Bittman, Mark. 2009. “Your Morning Pizza.” The New York Times, February 18 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/dining/18mini.html?_r=2&th&emc=th (Accessed February 18, 2009).

Davies, Russell. 2005. Egg, Bacon, Chips & Beans: 50 Great Cafes and the Stuff That Makes Them Great. HarperCollins UK.
http://www.amazon.com/Egg-Bacon-Chips-Beans-Great/dp/0007213786/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234972589&sr=8-1

Moskin, Julia. 2009. “Ending the Day Where It Began.” The New York Times, February 18 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/dining/18dess.html?th&emc=th (Accessed February 18, 2009).

David Brooks does one of his excellent readings of the American soul today in the Times. 

He notes the new Pew study that identifies Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa as the cities American would most like to live in. 

And he stops to ask why these cities should represent the American Dream circa 2009. 

His answer:

Brilliant.  Is it true?  Without tons more research, it is hard to say.  But what an excellent start. 

What I like about this speculation is the "bagginess" it identifies in the American dream.  It wants X and not-X.  City and not city.  Well organized but not hierarchical.  Clustered but distributed.  Well defined but open-ended.  Valued but not ideological. Machine but garden.

Splendid.

References

Brooks, David. 2009. “I Dream of Denver.” The New York Times, February 17 here (Accessed February 17, 2009).

ESPN, the sports cable network, has a long history of witty and interesting advertising.  In this ad, Shaq is seen playing Scrabble on the ESPN bus with a couple of journalists.  See the ad here.

It's just so very well done.  The combination of a guy this large with a game this small.  The violence of one game versus the tranguility of the other.  But really what sells this is a great performance from Shaq.  He is ever so particular, almost fussy…until crossed. 

These ads are entirely in keeping with the stunts and pranks that males play in childhood and that professional athletes play into adulthood.  So ESPN isn't asking players like Shaq, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James to leave their comfort zone. 

But this work is often so witty, so counter intuitive, so image-remaking, so alive to what makes proSports irritating and inauthentic, that is does remarkable things for these guys.  For perhaps the first and only time, we catch a glimpse of their range, intelligence, and humor, qualities that sports journalism doesn't seem able to communicate in any other forum. 

Acknowledgements

If anyone knows who it is at ESPN is responsible for these ads, please let me.  The journalist sitting on the far right, Stuart Scott, serves so well and so often, it's possible that he's a ring leader.  A cursory search with Google suggests that Wieden + Kennedy are also involved.

Thanks to Seth Gaffney, I am able to give you the name of the key player at ESPN. 

The Director of Sports Marketing there is Jeff Gonyo.

And the names of the Wieden + Kennedy team:

Creative Directors: Derek Barnes, John Parker

Copywriter: Josh DiMarcantonio

Art Director: Eric Stevens

Producer: Sarah Edwards

One of my least favorite things is the phrase “How cool is that?” 

That’s partly because I have an Aspie’s inclination to take rhetorical questions seriously.  I try to answer them.  (My answers to “what’s happening” were especially tragic.)

“How cool is that” is a special challenge for someone with an Aspie’s inclination because, let’s be fair, someone with an Aspie’s inclination has no idea what cool is.  Even when they study it as a hard working anthropologist.  

But I think “how cool is that” is stupid even as a rhetorical question.  Spoken in the recent New York Times TV spot, it just begs for a smart alecky answer.  And besides that the Grey lady should associate herself with a phrase like this is just sad.  By which I mean, not cool at all.